Upfall

Nir pointed at something in the far eastern sky above the village, a white smudge in the sky just above the treeline. "What is that?"

Yatom raised his binoculars and trained them on the spot. "It looks like a comet" he said disbelievingly. "A small comet with a short tail—shaped like a triangle. It appears to be oriented vertically moving away from the horizon."

"Let me see" said Feldhandler, grabbing the glasses.

"Is there any record of a comet in appearing in northern Europe during World War II?" asked Yatom.

"I don't know; I‘m not an astronomer" said Feldhandler‘ "But I suppose it's possible.“

They were silent after that, watching the pale white comet falling upward toward its distant star.

Historical Note

While the transport of an Israeli commando sayeret into the past is entirely fanciful, much of this story contains historical truths.

As to the possibility of time travel, associated paradoxes, wormholes and the rest, there is plentiful scientific speculation on these topics, of which only the most optimistic suggest that a device such as the one described in the novel could ever be practically constructed The power requirements would be immense, and the problems associated with travel into the past extensive. For the purposes of this novel I have taken the tack that such travel, if possible, would not necessarily create a temporal paradox, based on the creation of a new "time line." But that is just fictional convenience.

Beyond the science fictional plot device, much of this novel is based on fact.

Sayeret is the Hebrew word for scouts, or reconnaissance troops. As in the US. Marines, where a unit like First Reconnaissance Battalion is synonymous with commando troops, so it is with a sayeret in the IDF. The IDF has a great multiplicity of sayerets of which the most famous is Sayeret Matkal, the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit. While Sayeret Yatom is fictional, it's organization and equipment is similar to that of existing Israeli commando units.

Israeli planes did strike a secret Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and reliable sources report that a twelve man Israeli commando sayeret preceded the attack jets, to collect evidence and mark the target. Their insertion by conventional means would have been highly difficult and risky.

Eastern Poland in 1942 was an empire of death, thanks to the establishment of the three death camps that are the focus of the novel: Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec. These camps were established in the wake of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazi bureaucracy, under the authority of Reinhard Heydrich, formalized the contours of the final solution. The establishment of these camps is dubbed Operation Reinhardt in the novel, but in fact, this sobriquet was attached to the operation only after Heydrich's death in June 1942, to "honor" him. The depiction of the ambush of Heydrich‘s car is based on the actual attack on Heydrich in 1942, except that in the novel the victim is different.

The descriptions of the death camps, their layout, organization and operation are accurate. The three camps were isolated and sparsely staffed, generally with a platoon of SS men and a company of Ukranian guards. The death camps didn't require large garrisons, since almost all the people who entered these camps were immediately killed. In this, the death camps were different from the popular conception of “concentration camps" where Jews and other victims of the Nazis were often worked to death over months or years. The vast majority of the people who entered a death camp were killed within hours. Only a few hundred Jews were kept alive for tasks within the camp, and even these were periodically executed and replaced—especially the Sonderkommandos who had the grim job of emptying the gas chambers and disposing of the bodies—sometimes of their own family and friends.

More is known about Sobibor and Treblinka than Belzec. At the two former camps there were partially successful revolts in 1943, and thus hundreds immediate survivors, and several score by the end of the war. Belzac was the deadliest of the camps, from which only two Jews are known to have survived.

As in the novel, the original commander of Sobibor was Franz Stangl, who ran that camp until the summer of 1942, assisted by Der Spiess Gustav Wagner. Stangl then took over for Dr. Erbel at Treblinka, who had made a macabre hash of things there. Christian Wirth was the commandant 0f Belzac, the most formidable and lethal of the camps. In the novel he is given different duties before taking over at Belzec. Wirth was a psychopathic, cold-hearted gassing expert, who was one of history's greatest mass murderers. Upwards of 800,000 people were slaughtered at Belzac alone.